Parolee in Sex-Offender Program Sent Back to Prison

One of the sex offenders in the January Center has been sent back to prison after allegedly displaying aggressive behavior toward staff at the experimental sex-offender treatment facility in Montville.

Brian Garnett, director of external affairs with the Department of Correction, says that inmate Quentin Tyrrell was remanded from the Center on March 29. His special parole was revoked, Garnett says, he was re-incarcerated at the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center, and is now housed at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield. MacDougall-Walker is a high- to maximum-security prison.

According to its website, it is the largest correctional facility in New England, with a total of 2,123 inmates. Corrigan-Radgowski, in Montville, is a medium- to high-security facility.

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Tyrrell was convicted in November 2004 on a charge of risk of injury to a minor, involving contact with the intimate parts of someone under 16. To read the full statute, click here.

found that 50 percent had committed first-degree sexual offenses.

Since that story, the population has shifted. Now, 14 of the 24 men listed as being in the facility at 984 Norwich-New London Turnpike have convictions for first-degree sexual assault, according to the Connecticut Sex Offender Registry.

During discussions with town officials last year about siting the facility in Montville, Commissioner Leo Arnone had said that the facility would not house “the worst of the worst.” He says that that is still the case.

Garnett says that “Since the beginning of our discussions involving this facility, the Connecticut Department of Correction has made clear that it would not tolerate anything but full compliance with the goals of the sex offender treatment program and that failure to comply would be met with a swift return to incarceration.”

The reincarceration of Tyrrell, Garnett says, “is an example of that commitment.”